by Jim Geraghty
No sooner than the door closed than Ward, having consumed a healthy serving of moonshine, began to half-sing, half-yell boasts about how he had just saved the world, and how “hunting season” was now year-round.
“I had strings, but now I’m free,” Alec sang. “There are no strings on me.”
It took only a few moments for the men’s half-drunken boasting to spur Katrina to switch the Bose stereo system to a new song, U2’s “Window in the Skies.” Thankfully, it didn’t take much to get the inebriated Alec to shift to a raucous “Can’t you see what love has done?” chorus.
***
The black Lincoln Town Car was just idling at the curb; the rear doors were unlocked. Raquel opened the door.
Raquel had not seen Merlin in a long time.
He was now completely bald, bespectacled; he looked like a good character actor waiting to be cast in the film version of a Dickens novel, or the wise old grandpa making nickels appear out of a toddler’s ear in a Miracle hearing aid commercial. Raquel was glad to see him again, but part of her was saddened and a little frightened to see how much former CIA deputy director Harold Hare had aged. No doubt many suspected that he had gone senile years ago. He was in a tuxedo, somehow fitting his magician nickname.
“Glad you could spare a few minutes,” Merlin chuckled.
“You know I’d rearrange anything for our chats,” she said. “Obviously you knew I was at Katrina’s. Nice tux, is it prom night?”
Hare laughed heartily. “Mitchell’s got some big black-tie dinner downtown for the previous administration’s movers and shakers. He brought us out of the Crotchety Spy Retirement Home for Old Timer’s Day at the ballpark.”
Merlin had encouraged her to set up Alec and Katrina’s team years ago. Now, with the Atarsa crisis resolved, she felt like pushing Merlin on a suspicion that had been building, month by month, year by year.
“Why is it every time I talk to you, I feel like you know something you’re not sharing?” she asked. “I mean, I know you’re withholding something. What I can’t figure out is why.”
Merlin nodded, exhaled, then looked out the window.
“How many people at the agency believe in God?” Merlin asked.
“You know we don’t ask about that,” Raquel answered. “That’s just asking to get sued.”
“It’s hard for a nonbeliever to understand a believer,” Merlin shrugged. “Because of this, a lot of people over in that building, smart and skilled as they are, don’t understand half of what our enemies are fighting for. And if you don’t understand the psychology of your enemies, I’m not sure you can really understand what you’re fighting for.”
This answer didn’t satisfy her. “Theology?”
“I’ve spent my life researching this, asking these questions,” Merlin answered. “And everything you faxed me in the past weeks just offered further confirmation. Are you still blacking out sections of my memos as you read them?”
“Old habits die hard,” she responded. “Some of the things you write shouldn’t be seen by anyone.”
The pair chuckled that they were the last two people in America who faxed each other documents the old-fashioned way, and felt confident that their communications would remain secure, less because of their electronic encryption than because no one else in the world still remembered how to operate a fax machine.
Raquel had a nagging suspicion the conversation would turn in this direction. Aging had made Merlin increasingly less focused on the here and now and more focused on the hereafter. Part of her dreaded it and part of her knew she had to entertain Merlin’s crazy notions after everything she had seen, read, and heard in the past month.
Merlin closed his eyes and pictured some of the half-blacked-out classified documents she had faxed him the past weeks.
He pictured his desk with the documents: “Francis Neuse believed he had been kidnapped by demons and that kindness or cruelty generated nourishment for angels and demons. Sure, you can dismiss him as crazy, but when he says his captors had skulls for faces, how do you know he wasn’t looking at their souls?”
“Harold,” she scoffed. But she made a mental note that his photographic memory of the memos should dispel any claims of senility for a while.
“Jaguar in Mexico, all that Aztec worship stuff he had in his place … the gang that’s into Santa Muerte. Even if you think all their strange gods don’t exist, the fact that they believe in that guardian spirit, that force watching over them, influences their behavior. It makes them take risks they otherwise never would. Once you stop looking for literal angels and demons and you simply look for human behavior driven by a great illumination or a great darkness, all of a sudden you see signs everywhere.”
There it was, she realized.
“But you want me to accept it’s more than just belief, don’t you?” Raquel poked. “You think this thing, this attack, Atarsa, all of this … was some force beyond humanity trying to influence us, push us to some bad end.”
“Not just that,” Merlin said. “I think we had something unseen behind us, too, pushing us to stop them every step of the way. We had our own improbable luck out there. Any one of them could have suffered a fatal snakebite on that island in Brazil. I notice that the report said the goon in Mexico missed Alec at close range when he was standing in front of a mural of the Virgin Mary. Katrina had to make a hell of a shot in that airport – a peaceful neutral ground between countries representing two great faiths. The Atarsa plane could have taken off a few minutes earlier. Some might call all of those … miracles.”
Raquel shook her head skeptically.
Merlin was undeterred.
“I think this is just one more chapter in a fight that goes back throughout human history. And the fight and our role in it aren’t even close to being done. This isn’t just you, me, and a few others, trying to make sense of a world that seems stranger every day, evil men and evil acts that seem like something out of another time, terror-minded bands that seem all-too-literally demonic, stopped by only unimaginably selfless courage. It’s this sense that whatever’s going on, it’s accelerating, getting more dangerous, more extreme, building to some … bigger clash …”
Raquel felt a shudder. Sure, Merlin liked to drink deeply from the cups of religion and mysticism and myth and superstition, but that ominous vibe struck a chord deep in her gut. Life had once seemed so normal, so comparably calm, so happily obsessed with irrelevant nonsense. But that awful Tuesday decades ago seemed to have opened up Pandora’s box: terrorism, war, invasions, insurrections, chemical weapons, radical groups of every kind, splintering political and global factions, barbaric torture, sections of the map written off as ungovernable and uncontrollable, the slow-motion collapse of the international order. And now a twisted cult of Zoroastrian demon-worshippers, using not much more than troubled youth and steak knives, had managed to shake American society to its core.
She remembered reading that during the development of the first atomic bomb in the United States during World War Two, some of the world’s most brilliant scientists had serious fears about what would happen when man split an atom. Edward Teller feared that the reaction might ignite the atmosphere with a self-sustaining fusion reaction of Nitrogen nuclei—in other words, an ever-expanding fireball that would consume not just the test site but speed out all across the skies of the American Southwest and perhaps incinerate the entire planet. At the Trinity test, all of the scientists knew they were about to change the world in ways they could not fully comprehend beforehand. After the mushroom cloud rose, J. Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” More Westerly-focused theological minds among the scientists wondered if splitting the atom represented man cracking open God’s work, and in so tearing the curtain that obscured creation from its Creator—or the earthly realm from heaven and hell.
In that greatest of cities, on that worst of all possible Tuesday mornings, the coll
apse that shook the earth and every American’s soul was powerful enough to be measured in megatons, both literal and figurative. Raquel found herself wondering if the divine and the demonic were a little closer to the human heart ever since. She had certainly witnessed enough impossibly evil horror, and enough impossibly noble courage and compassion, in the two decades since.
Merlin leaned forward.
“In all this, rational, smart, professional, analytical, previously atheist, non-snake-handling, no Ouija boards, no healing crystals, no alien abductions, people with access to all of the best information from the widest and most thorough collection of sources … we look at the world and all of its terrible conflicts between the good and the evil, and we see …”
She waited for him to finish the sentence. She wasn’t ready to say it.
“Something greater at work. Maybe God and the Devil. Maybe angels and demons. But something … with the light and the dark.”
She sat back and contemplated. After a long while, she glanced back at Merlin.
“We can’t tell them. Not yet.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Geraghty is an award-winning senior political correspondent at National Review. His work has also appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Sun, The Washington Times and The Washington Examiner. His journalism has taken him from the reopening of the anthrax-fumigated Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill to firing an Israeli-made fully-automatic Uzi at the National Rifle Association’s range in Fairfax, Virginia to debating the constitutionality of NSA surveillance methods at the Heritage Foundation. He spent two years in Ankara, Turkey working as a foreign correspondent and studying anti-Americanism, democratization, Islam, Middle East politics, and U.S. diplomatic efforts and has also filed dispatches from Great Britain, Germany, Egypt, Italy, Israel, Spain, and Jordan. He is also the author of the novel The Weed Agency, which was a Washington Post bestseller, and the nonfiction books Voting to Kill and Heavy Lifting with Cam Edwards.